So fat the meaningful use EHR incentive program has effectively served its purpose of getting as many hospitals as possible to implement electronic health records platforms. Nearly every hospital is using an EMR system today. Now, the next phase of the program is to enhance the federal government’s approach of enabling those healthcare organizations and medical practices to seamlessly share medical data effectively According to a news source, the next phase has actually renamed the whole program as promoting interoperability.
HIMSS Federal and State Affairs Senior Director Jeff Coughlin said, “The job of meaningful use is done, now it’s a rebranding of the program to focus on the interoperability piece. This was definitely in line with a lot of what stakeholder groups were talking about: meaningful use would become more in line with the quality payment program.”
According to a reliable source, CMS has unveiled a proposed rule for hospital inpatient payment program along with some other initiatives that place interoperability in the most prominent position in the Department of Health and Human Services. The government agency is even looking at breaking down barriers that prevent the sharing of medical information among healthcare providers, and between physicians and patients.
Applauding the efforts of the CMS DirectTrust CEO MD David Kibbe said, “We have to give CMS an ‘A’ for effort in their attempt to simplify the terms and conditions for hospitals.”
There will still be certain conditions of participation in the new program. We know this by the news that revealed that in a bit to advance the new program, CMS has posted a request for information aimed at getting feedback on conditions of participation. And in the RFI, it was seen that CMS was requesting stakeholder feedback related to the possibility of reviewing conditions of participation. The end goal of all this exertion was boosting the health information exchange. Experts believe that promoting interoperability can really take health data sharing to the next and with this the only thing that will improve is healthcare. Let’s see how the new rules turn out to be.
